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Sunday 8 March 2015

Writing news and other updates

Writing on Freya and the Hairy Goddess is going really well.  She's met up with a couple of old friends, and they've discovered some great new characters along the journey that I am having all sorts of fun writing about.

I set myself a minimum of 1000 words a day during the week, trying to make sure I keep the flow going without knocking myself around too much (damn you Lyme disease!) but lately I've been going up to 1500 quite often.  The writing is just zipping along so well.

On weekends I don't write anything new, but I do let myself do other authory-type things on Saturdays.  On Sundays I try to have a full day off from thinking about it at all. It's good to rest the brain.  Instead I crochet, bake, read, and we play some sort of tabletop game after lunch.  It's good to get back to writing on Monday though. You know you're doing the right thing for you when you want to do it all the time!   

I've finally finished my final edit on Chicken Soup for Satan.  So now it is just to get it formatted ready for printing and Kindle, and to finish the titles on the cover.  Maybe by next weekend I'll be able announce my new book available on kindle, though it will take longer yet to get to print.

This week mum and I went to visit the 120 year old Oak tree that lives in a park near us.  It is a massive tree, so beautiful and healthy, with its roots deep into the nearby watercourse. It is one of the oldest in our State and was planted by a pioneer to the area.   It's very hard to capture its sheer size and majesty on camera, but here is my little mum for scale.


 It's thanks to a fellow Druid that we found out it was here, because we'd lived nearby for over 20 years and never known!  Mum loves trees too so we both really enjoyed our visit. I've come here before to meditate with this tree.  Many people do.  Its energy is marvelous!


This week I managed to get some footage of the baby magpie I wrote about in a post a while back. I'm happy to say she is still thriving, although her raising seems to be taking forever since she was so young to come out of the nest.  She can fly a little now, enough to be safe, but she still relies very much on her family. This little bit of footage shows the older baby getting marrow out of a dog bone one of the dogs took outside, peeping away to herself, then baby coming running and skwarking and fluttering to get something from one of the mamas, who then has a little sing.  Don't get a shock when Andyroo blows his nose in the room behind me! (I did!)


Work on the Anglo-Saxon lyre is going on here and there.  It took me ages to settle on a design for the decoration but I finally have, with some good input from Andryroo, and with the added bit of luck of seeing the design turned sideways and liking that better! This weekend he made two different types of bridges for it, and this is the one we like best, with a paper version of the design in the place where it will eventually go.
   

The bridge is made of Jarrah, which makes me happy because it is my favorite tree and it is nice to have a precious piece of it on an instrument that will hopefully last for many years.

Now I am working on some test pieces of pine to see what material will best be used to put the design on.  You can see here that I have two pieces of wood, one varnished and one not.  I've done half the design in permanent ink, and will paint the other half.  Then we'll varnish both and see what happens.  Burning (pyrography) would have also been a good choice, maybe better, but we'd have to buy the tool for the job then, and smoke can be an issue for me due to chemical sensitivity from the Lyme, so we'll use what we have.


I hope your weekend was full of creative interests and challenges just like ours was!    

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